LOOKING BACK BEFORE MOVING FORWARD:
BUILDING ON 15 YEARS OF COMPARATIVE
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH IN THE MEDITERRANEAN1
RONALD G. SULTANA
Abstract – This paper considers some of the promises and challenges in doing
comparative education in the Mediterranean region. The focus on the
Mediterranean is, in many ways, a wager, in that the region is rather more notable
for its diversity than for its commonalities. Nevertheless, it is argued that
comparative education goes – or should go – beyond the positivist concern with
comparing ‘like with like’. Rather, it is more about finding a standpoint from
where educational and related social phenomena can be seen from a different
perspective, generating a deeper understanding of dynamics, as well as fresh
insights. It is argued that the adoption of a Mediterranean lens facilitates this
process, though there are distinctive challenges that arise. Building on 15 years
experience in carrying out and co-ordinating comparative education projects in
the region, the paper outlines both the promise and pitfalls of the endeavour, and
traces an agenda for future research.
Introduction
I
n addressing the theme of comparative education in the Mediterranean, it seems
to me to be both necessary and useful to provide a context. I want to do so in a
particularly personal and ‘narrational’ manner, drawing on qualitative case studies
I have carried out in the region, as well as the structured attempt, through our EuroMediterranean Centre for Educational Research (EMCER), to develop Mediterranean
comparative studies as a generative endeavour. In so doing, I also want to introduce
readers to aspects of Malta’s culture and history, which, as will be seen, are what made
me who I am and have also had a decisive impact on my approach to scholarly work
in our region. This attempt to link culture, identity and scholarship seems to me the best
way to not only address this emergent field of Mediterranean comparative
education, but also to link it to the specific focus of the conference, namely
‘intercultural dialogue through education’. What I hope to do, therefore, is to draw on
my personal experiences over the last 15 years as a comparativist, highlighting the
academic as well as the personal and cultural identity challenges that this endeavour
represented for me, with a view to identifying three key obstacles that I see ahead
of us in this regional venture, while outlining some agendas for the future.
Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 13(2), pp. 9-25, 2008
9
Culture, identity and scholarship
My experiences as an educational researcher in the region are of two kinds.
The first set of experiences that I would like to refer to consists of the qualitative
studies that I have carried out over the past decade, at the behest of international
organisations such as UNICEF, UNESCO and the European Training Foundation.
My research has taken me to Albania, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Palestine,
Jordan, and to a more limited extent to Lebanon and Morocco. Some of these
studies have a single country focus. Others – like the recent study of career
guidance across ten countries and territories in the Middle East and North Africa
region (Sultana & Watts, 2007, 2008) – are comparative in scope. Most involved
writing case studies of educational innovation, which served as testimonies to
home-grown education success stories in the region. As I have argued elsewhere,
we need these stories of success, not least as a way of ‘writing back’ to an
international community that has tended to see educational development in the
region almost exclusively in deficit terms.
In my work, I have written about efforts to integrate low achieving students in
state schools across the poorest regions in Albania (Sultana, 2006a); I have
documented how girl-friendly community schools are managing to overcome
traditional prejudice in remote, rural areas in several governorates in Egypt, where
Muslim and Coptic parents now agree to keep their daughters in education rather
than marrying them off on the onset of puberty (Sultana, 2008a). In another study,
I have described how some brave teachers and schools in Syria have dared to go
against the grain, adopting critical pedagogies in order to ensure that their students
experience – and develop a taste for – democracy (Sultana, 2001a). In Tunisia, I
have tried to capture the rise of mastery learning as a movement to guarantee
access, for all children, to a minimum standard of education, even when they live
in the remotest villages on the borders with Algeria, in the desert-like environment
in Kef and Kasserine (Sultana, 2004, 2005). In a comparative study I have recently
carried out, I looked closely at the education policy implementation process in
Albania, Kosovo and Turkey, in an attempt to understand how reforms change
schools, or should I say, how schools change reforms (Sultana, 2008b).
The place I have visited most remains Palestine – a country that I always go
to with hope, but from which I increasingly depart with a heavy heart if not
despair, as I see people fenced in, communities fragmented, and human rights
trampled underfoot with impunity. In Palestine I documented the setting up of a
most impressive Education Management Information System, meant to support
the efficient implementation of an ambitious and sound education plan as well as
a new ‘national’ curriculum – not an easy task in one of the few territories in the
world where communities live in areas that are not contiguous to each other
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(Sultana, 2002a). In another study, I tried to capture the ingenuity of the
Palestinian people in Hebron, in their effort to ensure that their children retained
access to education, despite the curfews, attacks on schools, and mobility
restrictions imposed by Israeli forces after the second Intifada (Sultana, 2006b).
The Hebronites’ use of basic distance education methods has proved inspirational
to other societies in conflict, where schools and teachers are among the first to bear
the brunt of aggression. More recently, and in response to an invitation by
UNESCO and UNRWA, I have met with students, teachers and parents in refugee
camps in the West Bank, in Jordan and in Lebanon – including those living in the
infamous Sabra and Shatila camps – in order to evaluate the quality of education
that is available to Palestinians born in exile (Sultana, 2007). In Jordan, I have
documented an impressively successful parental education initiative, as well as
the implementation of the first large-scale Early Childhood Education and
Development service in the Arab world (Sultana, 2009).
All of these studies have involved field work, school and classroom
observations, interviews with policy makers, teachers, students, parents and other
educators. All have had an especially formative influence on me, shaping my
perceptions of the educational challenges in the region, as well as of the resources
that the region has in meeting such challenges. I will return to these studies at
a later stage in my paper, with a view to highlighting some of the lessons that
can be distilled from them with comparative education in mind.
The second set of professional experiences that connect me to the
Mediterranean revolves around the setting up of a comparative education
programme at the University of Malta 15 years ago. The story behind the setting
up of this programme, which has now matured into a modest research centre, is
relevant to this paper for more than one reason. It must be immediately said that
the initial motivation behind establishing the programme were less than pure – as
very little in academia is nowadays. The University of Malta, as indeed the rest of
the island, had made a strategic decision in the mid-80s to implement the ‘hub’
concept in an effort to use its position in the middle of the Mediterranean to
provide goods and services to the surrounding countries.
This hub concept was applied to several sectors of the economy – leading to
the setting up of a Freeport, the building of a new international airport, and the
rapid development of financial and offshore services. The concept was also to be
implemented in the higher education sector, with the University set to expand and
to attract fee-paying students from the surrounding countries, having, as a major
advantage, the use of English as the language of instruction. In parenthesis, it must
be said that the articulation of a Mediterranean agenda for the University has long,
historical roots (Fiorini, 2001). When it was first set up as a Jesuit College in 1592,
one of the motives behind the move was to enable Malta-trained European
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missionaries to move to North Africa to help spread Catholicism. Later, in the
early 19th century, there were plans to establish Malta as a seat of learning in the
Mediterranean, with a proposal to open a second university on the smaller island
of Gozo tabled in 1818. One hundred and fifty years later, academics were again
encouraged to focus on Mediterranean studies, or to introduce a Mediterranean
dimension in their teaching and research, in some cases building on an already
established and modest – but nevertheless international – reputation in some areas,
notably anthropology, but also law, literature, and theology.
This also fed into a widespread fantasy that the Maltese have of themselves,
namely that puny Malta can act as a bridge between North Africa and Europe,
when in fact our history shows that what we have done best is to act as a bulwark
to keep ‘non-Europeans’ – whoever these are – (and Islam) out of Europe2 – a
vocation that, might I add, we ironically seem to have revived with a vengeance
when, following our entry into the EU in 2004, we became a vital outpost in
helping the EU secure its borders through collaborating on Frontex3 operations.
In this way, the Mediterranean sea, which for centuries has acted as the main
vehicle of communication between the basin’s north and south, east and west, is
now traversed by an invisible but no less effective replica of the Berlin wall,
infused by the Schengen4 spirit which strives to keep the frontiers of fortress
Europe intact and the boatpeople at bay.
This University-driven Mediterranean agenda coincided with other aspects of
my own personal history as an academic: my ego had taken several blows at
conferences where few, if any, ever turned up to listen to papers I had prepared on
educational issues pertaining specifically to Malta. Few, if any, felt that what
happened in a country barely larger than a mid-sized European town, with a
population of less than 400,000, had any relevance to them or their own work. The
new research agenda proposed by the University, therefore, promised to expand
my horizons from a too narrow focus on Malta toward a wider-embracing
comparative gaze at the rest of the region. With the hope, therefore, of becoming
somebody at the university, and somebody at international conferences and the
academic stage more generally, I embarked on this Mediterranean Odyssean
voyage, little knowing where it would lead to, which dangers were lurking below
the shimmering surface, which short-sighted (or should I say one-eyed) cyclopean
university authority would try to block me or administer me to death, and which
Sirens would attempt to lure me off track.
Initial efforts were promising. I recall being encouraged by the likes of the
Sicilian Giovanni Pampanini, who had already been fighting windmills, so to
speak, in his quixotic efforts to stimulate interest in a Mediterranean
comparative dimension. Another key influence was Marco Todeschini,
erstwhile professor of comparative education at the University of Milan, Italy.
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Together with the support of colleagues from the Faculty of Education in Malta,
and some seed funding from UNESCO, I established an extensive network of
educational researchers from all over the region, creating a database that
profiled their academic background and expertise with a view to facilitating
collaborative projects. Different members of this network met annually at small,
intimate conferences in Malta, Florence, Cyprus and elsewhere, were we
focused on such issues as higher education (Guri-Rosenblit & Sultana, 1999;
Sultana, 1999), educational innovation (Sultana, 2001b), teacher education
(Sultana, 2002b), and power and education (Sabour & Sultana, 2003) – each
bringing the experiences of his or her own country, and sharing them in intensive
debating sessions that increased our knowledge of each other and provided us
with new opportunities for understanding how our respective education systems
were marked, for instance, by shared Mediterranean colonial and post- or neocolonial histories, by the nature of the relations between state, religious power
and formal schooling, by cultural traditions that shaped gender boundaries
and lifechances in particular ways, and so on.
Different members of this same network also supported the launch of an
international journal with a regional focus, the Mediterranean Journal of
Educational Studies (MJES). Now in its 13th year of publication, the journal,
produced, I might add proudly, in cottage industry style, appears twice annually,
and with 25 issues behind it, has established itself as a unique venue for
scholarship reporting on educational issues in the Mediterranean, and serving
subscribers from as far afield as Australia, Russia, the US, China and Japan, not
to mention most of Europe, the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, north Africa.
We have recently turned it into a free open-access online journal, hoping to reach
out to more academic communities, particularly as we notice that those who we
most want to engage in our region are the ones with the least resources to
subscribe, despite the advantageous fee structures we have put into place for low
income countries. It is for this reason too that we have thus far resisted requests
by major journal publishing companies to sell them our journal, fearing that,
despite the undeniable benefits of international market penetration and prestige
that they offer, the profit motive will keep the market price high, excluding those
who we most wish to reach.
This very productive interaction between like-minded scholars from the
region, together with the knowledge resources that have accumulated in our
Centre, led to the launch of a master’s degree focusing on comparative education
in the Mediterranean – to our knowledge, the first master’s of its kind, now being
offered to a second cohort of students. We hope to build on this experience in order
to open it up to students from all over the region, particularly if we manage to
secure sponsorships and scholarships from the sources we are tapping.
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I cannot stress enough how pivotal and compelling both these sets of
overlapping experiences – that is, both the qualitative research I carried out in the
region and the setting up of a Mediterranean comparative education research
centre – have been for me academically and personally.
Let me first focus a little on the impact they have had on my academic work,
and particularly on my understanding of educational issues. Prior to the start of
this Mediterranean journey, I had been happily looking at educational phenomena
in Malta through the theoretical and conceptual lenses provided by mainstream,
metropole scholars – particularly Anglo-Saxon ones, and to a lesser extent
continental ones such as Bourdieu or Habermas, often through translations or
commentaries in English. Needless to say, these remain giants on whose shoulders
we need to climb. Nevertheless, my qualitative research in the region soon made
it clear to me that the contexts from which metropole frameworks arose differed
from those that we are embedded in in the economic and geographic ‘South’. The
comparative educational work I was doing with colleagues pointed out the need
for developing a greater sensitivity to the fact that the economic, cultural, political
and social dynamics in the so-called ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’ have their
own specificity, and require more context-sensitive theoretical tools in order to
carry out the Freirian task of reading or decoding our world ... with a view, of
course, to contribute to the writing of a different text.
Some of the colleagues engaged in this effort to develop theoretical
understandings of educational issues in the Mediterranean have been particularly
successful in working both with and against mainstream sociological frameworks,
developing sophisticated and nuanced understandings of educational issues. The
Catalan Xavier Bonal, for instance, the Palestinian André Mazawi, as well as
Linda Herrera and my colleague Peter Mayo – all of whom have served
generously on the editorial board of our journal – have written some excellent
sociological papers on a variety of aspects of education in the Mediterranean, and
are in a way exceptional in that their work has attained visibility in both North and
South. But there is much, out there, in education, as in other disciplines, that is
written in ways that connect in an especially profound and visceral way with our
realities – even if those writings predictably fail to capture the attention of
metropole publishers and their public.
Earlier I said that the experience of developing a Mediterranean comparative
education dimension has had an impact on me both academically and personally.
I have dealt a little with the former, and about that even more later. I must,
however, dwell a little on the impact all this has had on my sense of who I am. The
conference focus is, after all, on ‘intercultural dialogue’, and what is ‘culture’ but
the cultivation of a sense of self within broadening circles of overlapping
communities? This word ‘intercultural’ – like its relative term ‘cross-cultural’ – is
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a bit tricky: it tends to project an image of essentialised and stable entities – reified
national cultures that, at the best of times, are prepared to converse with each other
(Bensalah & Daniel, 2003). This is a potentially dangerous conception, which
plays into the same ideological terrain of that powerful myth that has captured our
imaginary, namely the infamous ‘clash of civilisations’. Cultures, to my mind, are
complex historical mongrels whose very being is permeated to the core by ‘others’
through processes of osmosis and the uncontrollable and permissive intercourse
and exchange between peoples. This, too, is my story.
I was brought up in a colonial Malta: independence was still 6 years away
when I was born, and some of my earliest imagic memories of my childhood
include portraits of a young Queen Elizabeth in my primary school and
classrooms, and waving flags and genuflecting in her presence or in the presence
of any member of her family who took it upon himself to have a vacation in this
island in the sun, often under the guise of a ‘diplomatic mission’ – or perhaps it
was the other way round. I recall my father taking me to Valletta to see the
changing of the guards in front of the Palace in summer, and standing with him
staring in awe at these tall, white Bombay-helmeted men marching in the midday
sun – men who somehow managed not to slouch or sweat … further evidence of
their demi-god status. I remember my thin, wizened grandfather in mourning
when Mintoff, our then illustrious lion of a prime minister, declared that political
independence could not be celebrated until the foreign naval base closed down and
the Brits given their marching orders. My grandfather, like many other thousands
of Maltese, felt that the island would go to the dogs without the patronage and
protection of the Brits, who had ruled with grace and sagacity for 164 years – or
so our school textbooks told us. These books indeed told us much about the
wondrous British Empire, but precious little about our own history … and when
it did, it was largely to emphasise how Christian we were, how European our roots
were, and how glorious we were to resist Islam, the Turks and the Arabs …
conveniently forgetting to tell us that linguistically, culturally, genetically and
even religiously, we had absorbed our so-called ‘adversaries’ right into the core of
our being. I grew up, therefore, thinking of myself as white, as European, as
Christian, and indeed as almost English ... though not quite.
You can imagine, therefore, what a shock it was for me to travel to the UK for
my studies at the age of 24, when, climbing a bus in London for the first time, a
young, blue-eyed man spat on the floor! So, these demi-gods could be crass at
times as well! Oh my! … It came as a shock to me that when I spoke in what I
thought was perfect English, I was barely comprehensible to the real Brits; that
I was not as white as I had been led to believe; and that the more I travelled north
in Europe, the darker I grew, both literally and figuratively. You can perhaps also
imagine the even greater shock I felt when I started my travels in our region three
15
years later, to discover that Tunisians and Moroccans could understand most of
what I told them when I spoke ‘Maltese’, that there are areas in Jerba, Rabat,
Beirut, Jaffa, Naples, Valencia, Alexandria or Tripoli which evoke my own
childhood in villages in Malta and Gozo: those smells, those colours, those flatroofed houses, those women talking to each other as they hung the family clothes
to dry on rooftops, the sprawl of bodies, those hot nights with windows and doors
ajar at cleverly calculated angles to catch the remotest of cool breezes, those
scrawny cats running down dark, winding yet comforting alleyways … No
wonder Braudel, in his masterly portrayal of the region, exclaimed ‘A native of the
Mediterranean, wherever he (or she) might come from, would never feel out of
place in any part of the sea!’ (Braudel, 1992, p. 237).
What started off, for me, as a smart-Alec move to make headway in academia
had increasingly become a much more profound journey that was to shape my
sense of who I am, as well as my efforts to connect this sense of identity with
reality around me, in purposeful, reflective ways. Let me now focus the last part
of my address on the lessons I have learnt during this journey, and try to tease out
some issues that may have implications for us participants at this conference, as
we try to deepen our understanding of what comparative education in the
Mediterranean might feel and look like. While describing these experiences, I will
simultaneously be articulating elements of an agenda for Mediterranean
comparative education for the future. I will only focus on three key issues here,
assuming that several others will arise during the debates and discussions we will
have during the conference, and hopefully afterward too, once we have returned
to our respective homes.
Mediterranean comparative education and apostasy
First, a note about the legitimacy of having the Mediterranean as a unit of
analysis in comparative work. I have written at some length about this in other
contexts (Sultana, 1998), so I will just trace out what is at stake here. I recall that
when I first started talking at gatherings of comparative education scholars about
what we were trying to do in Malta, the initial reactions by some of the guru
patricians of the field was not only marked by scepticism, but sometimes by
outright hostility. Lê Thàn Khôi, for instance, dismissed the project, claiming that
there are too many differences in the region that we called ‘the Mediterranean’ to
make it the object of comparative analyses. His position was that it was legitimate
to focus on southern European studies, or Arab region studies, or Middle East
studies, but the all-embracing notion of ‘Mediterranean’ could not hold water – at
least in scientific terms, of course. Andreas Kazamias, erstwhile President of the
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Comparative and International Education Society and emeritus Professor of
Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Athens,
was initially unconvinced at, as he saw it, this attempt ‘to put the Mediterranean
Humpty Dumpty together again!’ (Kazamias, 2001, p. xii). He wondered openly
whether this was a wild goose chase, whether the imagined Mediterranean gods
were false, and whether the idea of a Mediterranean space was a figment of our
imagination. Other reactions were equally barbed: one professor at Notre Dame
University in the north of Lebanon felt that what we were trying to do was
politically problematic, as it diverted energy and attention away from a focus on
Arab issues. A highly esteemed Greek comparativist, Professor Marie Eliou,
criticised the attempt to start a journal when there was not yet an established
community of scholars behind it. An Italian colleague challenged us to think
through the implications of substituting a Euro-centric agenda with a MEDAcentric one, when perhaps what we needed most was a more all-embracing vision
of global citizenship.
In many ways, of course, these critiques are not without some justification, and
the fact that there have been few if any comparative education studies in the region
is portentous. Most international aid agencies and development organisations, as
well as research institutes, have, at best, a Middle East and North Africa (MENA),
or a South European studies programme. Even those which do claim to focus on
the whole region, calling their programmes MEDA, or even Mediterranean – such
as the Mediterranean Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre at the European
University Institute in Firenze – are often mostly interested in studies of Arab
states, using the ‘Mediterranean’ caption interchangeably – and I would dare say,
euphemistically – for ‘Arab’. The diversities between – not to mention within –
countries in the Mediterranean are striking, with significant and cumulative
differentials in all or most aspects of economic and social development indices,
whether we are talking about demography, access to power resources, the role and
place of religion, the status of individuals and their relationship to inalienable
rights, and so on. Diverse colonial histories have led to the development of
different educational traditions and systems, as well as to country-specific
relations with metropole countries, and with the power blocs present in the region,
including the US and the EU.
A simple but hopefully not simplistic answer to all this is that what we are most
interested in doing in this endeavour that we are referring to as Mediterranean
comparative education is not so much as the search for epistemological and
positivist purity in comparing ‘like with like’, as much as finding a new standpoint
– one among many others, I might add – from where to gaze at phenomena and
to apprehend it in new ways, by refracting it through a different lens. As I have
already noted earlier with reference to my own personal journey, adopting a
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‘Mediterranean perspective’ can open up new opportunities for the generation of
more context-specific and context-responsive frameworks that help us make sense
of educational dynamics. We have discovered, over the years, how bringing
together scholars from different parts of the Mediterranean – Israelis and
Palestinians; Croats, Albanians and Serbs; Greeks and Turks (not to mention
Greek and Turkish Cypriots); Syrians and Lebanese; Christians, Muslims and
Jews of all denominations and shapes and sizes – generates thematic concerns that
might not have surfaced otherwise, including notions of our responsibility for
future generations which may contrast with our perceived obligations to ensure
that, through the curricular narratives we present our children with, they never
forget the atrocities we have managed to pile upon each other across time and
space.
We would also do well to keep firmly in mind the fact that regions are political
constructs anyway. Take the EU for example: who would have thought that Turkey
would be seriously considered in the construction of a united Europe? Certainly
not on any cultural, economic or even geographical logic. And yet there we are,
with Europe’s frontiers expanding to include countries that, when the European
Coal and Steel Community was established in 1950, would not have been
considered potential candidates of the new Europe, by any stretch of the
imagination. If Europe can think of itself as a supranational entity, despite the
many diversities it embodies, there is no reason why the Mediterranean should not
– assuming it wanted to. Seen historically, this Mediterranean gaze is nothing
more than another faltering step in our effort to widen our associative communities
from family to clan, from clan to nation, and from nation to region and to more
all-embracing notions of global citizenship.
In some ways, then, what we are doing here is taking up the words that
Kazamias uttered when he was converted to the notion that this form of
comparative education was not an apostasy as much as a different way of doing
‘science’. ‘So what’, quizzed Andreas, ‘if the Gods are false, if good things are
done in their name?!’ (Kazamias, 2001, p. xii). Similarly supportive was an
anonymous reviewer of a paper I submitted to US comparative education
journal, who suggested that what we were doing was promising not only for our
region, but for other areas in the world which had a sea in ‘Medi-terra’ – in the
middle of lands – such as the Caribbean, for instance. Robert Cowen, a UK
comparativist based at the Institute of Education in London, picked up on this
theme when he commented very positively on our efforts at a European Society
of Comparative Education (CESE) conference, noting the promise in focusing
on what he referred to as ‘permealogies’ and ‘immunologies’ in the ‘rims’ and
‘peripheries’ of this world (Cowen, 1998). Such international support is
comforting. But nothing beats the thrill of seeing colleagues from around the
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region become excited by this venture, and nothing underscores the value of the
project more than its ability to generate new insights into understanding and
promoting sound educational practice in our region. This, I would submit, is a
key agenda for us all, and for a robust future for comparative education with a
Mediterranean dimension.
The many heads of the neo/post-colonial Hydra
Epistemological hurdles were the least of our worries as we set about giving
shape to our Mediterranean comparative education project. Much more pressing
were challenges that I will group under the term ‘neo/post-colonial’. This needs
some unpacking, and a few examples will hopefully give a sense of what I am
referring to here.
First, we have encountered substantial difficulties in getting south-south
collaboration. Some of these difficulties arise out of the fact that our home
universities rarely have the funds to facilitate research and research-related
travel. Any such funds are generally made available by agencies and institutions
based in the economic ‘North’, and they are often premised on notions of
north-south transfer of knowledge, rather than on development models that
acknowledge the value of south-south collaboration. But there is a further reason
to this, one that belies post-colonial mentalities where we fail to value the
indigenous knowledge and wisdom we have in our own region, preferring
instead to work exclusively with universities and academics in metropole
countries. There are, of course, several advantages in doing so – not least the
pleasure of being taken seriously by the big shots in town. But the downside is
equally obvious, in terms of choice of research themes, of theoretical frameworks
to make sense of data, of the usefulness of such research for the communities in
which we are embedded, and so on.
Post- and neo-colonial issues that have an impact on our efforts to develop a
Mediterranean dimension to our work arise in other ways too. Much, for instance,
has been written about the World Bank and its role in reinforcing dependency
through its fundamentalist commitment to neo-liberalism as the master doctrine
that guarantees development. I am convinced that such critiques are fair and just.
What is even more worrying from the perspective of a critical comparativist is the
fact that education in our region is increasingly being colonised by World Bank
agendas, particularly now that Sector-Wide Approaches (SWAP) are
commonplace. SWAPs may mean well in getting all education actors, including
international aid and development agencies, around a table in order to ensure
better co-ordination and more efficient use of funds. I have been around several
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of these tables as an observer, and very often these are World Bank tables, in World
Bank offices, chaired by World Bank staff. I have seen UN agencies, including
UNICEF and UNESCO – whom traditionally I have looked up to for the
occupation of the moral high ground – being drawn into the ideological terrain as
defined by the World Bank.
Much of the goings-on at these SWAP meetings are motivated by good
intentions, and also by a principled commitment to educational development.
But it is worrying that underneath it all is an increasingly unquestioned slide
into a utilitarian, one-dimensional view of education as defined and determined by
the ‘North’, in terms of what should be prioritised, who and how should
implement it, and what outcomes should be expected to determine success.
Anything that does not measure up to this ‘referent’ is consequently defined in
deficit terms, further reinforcing dependency.
It bears underling the point that the European Union’s activities are not outside
this critique, despite the fact that the EU likes to present itself as enamoured of the
so-called ‘social model’, which it contrasts to the presumably more vicious
‘market model’ of the US. While some of its interventions in the region are to be
lauded – and I have in mind the recent establishment of the Anna Lindh
Foundation for Dialogue between Cultures in Alexandria, Egypt – others are much
less so.
Take the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, for instance. The so-called
Barcelona Process – which was launched in 1995 in order to establish a wide
framework for political, economic and social relations between the member states
of the EU and partners of the Southern Mediterranean – brazenly suggests that
higher education institutions should be set up and developed in the MEDA region
with EU member state support in order to safeguard EU economic interests,
especially in relation to the goal of offsetting competition from the US. More
recently, the EU borrowed a feather from the cap of the American Fulbright
programme, establishing an Erasmus Mundus programme in order to ensure that
the brightest and the best from developing countries in the world studied – and
stayed on – in the EU rather than in the US. There seems to have been little concern
here about the fact that what represents a brain gain for the EU in its efforts to
reach the Lisbon objective ‘to become the most competitive and dynamic
knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010’, in fact represents a brain drain
from countries who can ill afford this luxury.
Our efforts to develop a Mediterranean dimension in our comparative work
would therefore, in my view, require us to recognise what some of the drivers
behind development aid are, and to establish our own agendas in ways that are
more responsive to our needs, and which benefit our priorities. Mediterranean
comparative education should also be recognisable by its active search for
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alternative forms of educational practice, ones that contest the reductionist vision
of schooling in terms of skills and competences that drives so much of what passes
as education in the world today.
The lure of ‘dislocated provincialism’
The development of a Mediterranean dimension in comparative education has
a third challenge to face, one that I am here referring to as ‘dislocated
provincialism’ – an oxymoron, of course, but one which serves to vehicle what I
wish to say. By its very nature, comparative education requires scholars to rise
above the particular and to consider this in relation to broader principles, as well
as in relation to broader geographic and epistemological vistas. Indeed, one of the
benefits that is usually attributed to comparative education is that it provides a
body of descriptive and explanatory data which allows us to see various practices
and procedures in a very wide context that helps to throw light upon them. Now,
a lot of what passes as educational scholarship in our region tends to be precisely
the opposite. I am here reflecting in particular on the literally scores of
submissions that reach the editorial board of the MJES, and that we have to reject.
Needless to say, there are many good, even excellent pieces that we receive and
publish, and that also appear in other, often more prominent journals
internationally. On the basis of what reaches us, and in the light of conversations
I have had with Arab, Turkish and other scholars from Mediterranean countries
whose languages I do not speak, and who could comment on papers that appear
in their own country’s journals, I have drawn a number of conclusions which, if
correct, signal a serious obstacle to the development of comparative education
in our region.
I am here referring to the fact that many papers in education are narrow and
provincial in scope. They typically focus on a very specific issue, and restrict their
purview to a very limited and particular context – such as ‘Student attitudes
towards assessment in Grade 12 in a state school in Jordan’, for instance, or ‘The
use of portfolios in initial teacher training at the University of St Joseph in Beirut’.
My problem with these kinds of papers is not the narrow focus in and of itself: after
all, as Leopold Sedar Senghor once pointed out, by living the particular to the full
we reach the dawn of the universal. It is rather that such studies remain narrowly
provincial, failing to place this specific context in a broader national or regional
one, or to analyse how national, political, cultural or economic dynamics have an
impact on the phenomena that are being described. Hence the term ‘dislocated
provincialism’ that I am using here. At the end of the day, one is forgiven for
concluding that what is being described could very well have taken place in
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Australia or the Azores, as no contextual clues are given, nor is there an insight
into how specificity of place shapes educational phenomena and practices in
particular ways.
Such lack of embeddedness appears in other ways too. Literature reviews
draw almost exclusively on what is reported in other – generally western and
high income countries – and the assumption is made that what was discovered
in those countries applies unproblematically to the author’s own. It is not
surprising, therefore, that theoretical and explanatory frameworks, when they
appear, are almost without exception also drawn from metropole countries, with
little attempt to acknowledge the specificities of country and region – such as,
for instance, the preponderance of informal labour markets and the impact this
has on motivation to engage with formal learning; the negative returns to
schooling; the importance of ‘wasta’ and family influence in getting
employment; the particular relationship between religious elites and leaders in
the state apparatus, and how this impacts on education in such areas as
curriculum development; or the way private tutoring reproduces élites.
Insensitivity to contexts is also often evident when it comes to making
recommendations about ways forward, such as when teacher development models
are unproblematically borrowed from the UK or the US or France, with little if any
attention given to the fact that most teachers in our region are underpaid, and have
to hold down a second and third job after school hours in order to make ends meet.
In such conditions, teachers have little desire or motivation to invest spare
capacities in improving their teaching through the new-fangled approaches
promoted by the North, such as school development planning, curriculum
development in teams, and after-school preparatory sessions, which might work
well in other contexts were teachers do little else but teach.
The methodological tools that are employed also tend to be narrowly
quantitative in scope, with papers typically rehearsing the tired mantra that starts
off with ‘purpose of the study’, followed by a ‘definition of the problem’ and a
‘definition of terms’, moving on to a description of the methodology, with
subsections on sampling, and the choice of instruments used to measure the
phenomena in question. When we come to the substance of the paper, what we get
is a ‘discussion of results’ section which generally includes the presentation of
several, often impeccably designed statistical tables. However, in far too many
instances, the reaction of reviewers to such attempts are that the mountain has
laboured only to give birth to a mouse … or, to quote the advice given by an
exasperated and perhaps somewhat cheeky referee: ‘What is not worth measuring
is not worth measuring well’.
There are, of course, many possible reasons for these shortcomings – though
we need to be careful and nuanced in our approach to avoid the temptation of
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unproblematically adopting the referents and measuring sticks of metropole
universities. Certainly, the almost total dependence of academics on the state for
their livelihood renders them vulnerable – as the Finland-based Moroccan
sociologist Sabour (2001) states in his discussion of academics in the Arab world,
it is a bit like sending out the matador to face the bull without his muleta. The
limited intellectual freedom in some of the region’s universities, together with not
unfounded fears of reprisals, can act as a powerful deterrent to sociologically
imaginative and politically engaged research that speaks to context in very
specific ways. The fact remains, however, that comparative education in our
region can only thrive if, to sustain the image, we do take the bull by the horns and
develop a community of inquiry where we support each others’ efforts to engage
the world as it is, to imagine a world as it could and should be.
In conclusion
In conclusion, what I have attempted to do in this paper is to reflect on my
personal and professional journey in developing a Mediterranean dimension in
comparative education. I have highlighted the way that such a journey has
opened the road for cultural dialogue for me, a dialogue that has both intrapersonal and inter-personal dimensions leading to self-discovery, and to the
discovery of the ‘other’ in this ‘self’, as all Odyssean educational endeavours
tend to do. I have also highlighted the practical steps that we have put into place
at the University of Malta in an effort to take on what, for many, is a quixotic
and idealistic desire to connect educational researchers in this diverse, often
divided region of ours. Finally, I have pointed out to three main obstacles that
we still need to overcome if we are to make headway in the future, namely:
(i) the lack of confidence in the legitimacy of our project; (ii) the neo-liberal and
neo-colonial influence on the definition of what counts as education; and (iii) the
dislocated provincialism that pervades much of our educational scholarship. In
all three cases, the antidote seems to me to be the same: the development of a
community of scholars that collaborates across south-south and south-north
axes in order to develop the confidence, strength and drive to make a positive
difference to education in our region. It is my hope that future activities and
associational endeavours such as the one represented by the Mediterranean
Society of Comparative Education, take us one step further in this direction by
providing us with an eminent opportunity for dialogical co-investigation.
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Notes
1. Thanks are due to Linda Herrera for her careful reading of the text, and for her constructive
criticism. I am also indebted to André Mazawi for his astute and insightful feedback on various
aspects of our Mediterranean initiatives, which helped me better appreciate our efforts in relation
to the wider context of comparative education.
2. The first to refer to Malta as a ‘bulwark’ – in recognition of its having successfully halted the
advance on the Ottomans on Europe – was the German scholar Hieronymus Megiser in 1606 (see
Friggieri & Freller, 1998).
3. Frontex, which is based in Warsaw (Poland), is the EU agency for external border security. It is
responsible for co-ordinating the activities of the national border guards to ensure the ‘security’ of
the EU’s borders with non-member states.
4. The term ‘Schengen Agreement’ refers to two agreements concluded among European states in
1985 and 1990 that deal with the abolition of systematic border controls among the participating
countries.
Ronald G. Sultana is professor of Sociology and Comparative Education at the
University of Malta, and directs the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational
Research (EMCER). Information about EMCER, as well as many of the papers
referred to in this paper, can be found at http://www.um.edu.mt/emcer His e-mail
address is: ronald.sultana@um.edu.mt
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